Ulysses S. Grant made a big splash in Corpus Christi

CORPUS CHRISTI - Ulysses S. Grant, a second lieutenant in the 4th Regiment of Infantry, thought he knew how the pulleys worked on the transport ship "Alabama."

As soldiers were being transferred to smaller ships — lighters — to cross Corpus Christi Bay, Grant jumped up on the rail, grabbed a rope, and fell head over heels in the bay. Soldiers were laughing as he was pulled back on deck, like a wet parcel. Grant was laughing himself.

Grant, 23 years old, was among the soldiers who landed at Corpus Christi in the summer of 1845. Zachary Taylor's command, concentrated in Louisiana, had been ordered to move to the disputed territory of South Texas as Texas prepared to join the United States.

Taylor chose Corpus Christi as the staging ground for his army. It really wasn't a town. More like a trading post with a couple of hundred people. It would soon be an immense armed camp with half of the Army, 4,000 soldiers, in training for the coming conflict. Corpus Christi, Grant thought, was "a small Mexican hamlet."

Or not. That was one of the questions a war would decide.

Corpus Christi also was the cheap horse capital of the world, where mustangs could be had for a dollar or two. Grant, a fine rider who loved horses, bought four mustang ponies. The man Grant hired to cook his meals and clean his tent, a free black named Valere, was taking the horses to water and they got away.

"I heard that Grant lost five or six dollars worth of horses the other day," Taylor's adjutant joked. A slander, said Grant. They were worth $20.

Grant escorted a paymaster's wagon train to San Antonio. Wild game abounded along the way but they saw no people until they reached San Antonio. On the way back one night they heard wolves howling. Grant thought there were 20 or more in the pack. When they got close enough to see them, there were only two. Years later, when he was president, Grant remembered that when he heard the howling of members of Congress. "There are always more of them before they are counted."

That December, officers decided to stage "Othello." They looked for someone to play the beautiful Desdemona. Grant was urged to try out for the part. He had a trim figure and almost girlish good looks; his friends called him "Beauty." Though the costume fit perfectly, the officer playing the Moor couldn't look at Grant without laughing. They sent to New Orleans for a professional actress to play Desdemona. After that, Grant grew a beard to hide his girlish good looks. He was "Beauty" no more.

In March 1846, Washington ordered Taylor to move to the border. The army left Corpus Christi on March 6-8. The march south covered 174 miles over hog wallow prairies and sands glistening with salt. Grant rode out to see herds of mustangs that gave the region its name: the Wild Horse Desert. They covered the horizon. Too many, Grant thought, to be corralled in the state of Rhode Island. It was rough traveling through the Big Sands, with ponds of drinkable water far apart. Soldiers struggled along with parched mouths and cracked lips under a tormenting sun. Grant admired the endurance of the enlisted men. After a three-week trip, the army reached the Rio Grande.

Grant was in the first battles of the Mexican War, at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. Grant led one charge and captured a Mexican colonel who, it turned out, had already been captured. "My exploit was equal to that of the soldier who boasted that he had cut off the leg of one of the enemy," Grant explained. "When asked why he did not cut off his head, he replied, 'Someone had already done that.'"

The battles would have been won, Grant realized, if he had not been there. And he wished he had not been there, for he considered it a most unjust war.

"I know the struggle I had with my conscience during the Mexican War," he wrote in his memoirs. "I have never forgiven myself for going into that. I had very strong opinions on the subject. I don't think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not the moral courage enough to resign."

Besides Grant, there were several future Civil War generals, Union and Confederate, with Zachary Taylor at Corpus Christi. The more famous were James Longstreet, George Meade, Braxton Bragg, John Magruder, E. Kirby Smith. (Robert E. Lee was not at Corpus Christi; he joined Taylor's army at Monterrey.) At the time, there was little to suggest that an obscure second lieutenant named Ulysses S. Grant would go on to become the most acclaimed general of his time, the Union commander in chief who would finally beat "Bobby" Lee to end the Civil War.